Restaurant Marketing Tools: Social Media & PR

Written for Great Taste magazine, Fall, 2017, by Alyson Dutch

Marketing anything from a restaurant or a food product to a pair of sneakers or a travel app, always begins from one central piece of knowledge: the profile of your customer. From there any marketing methodology can be applied – and it will be the right one. Every business owner, especially creative food people, struggle to know when and where to put their marketing dollars. Often entrepreneurs are barraged with all kinds of opportunities and are swayed by buzz words which serve as a vague compass from which to make decisions.

Two of those buzz words are “social media” and “PR.”

This is the first of a series that will provide descriptions of every kind of marketing, so that you can make intelligent decisions that move the needle for your business. But first, business owners must understand the big picture, which is that any business has three parts: The Product, The Operations and The Marketing. I call it “The P.O.M. Principle.” Product is the concept of the restaurant, the menu, the food and the beverage program. The operations are the systems that make it go: the venue, people, money, the POS system, your purveyors and how ingredients get to your location. The marketing is anything that you do to get that product onto the plate of a customer who happily (and quickly) will pay for your culinary experience. From fine dining to QSR; these edicts apply.

There are many types of marketing. Here is a bit about what exactly is meant by “social media” and “PR” and what these methods can do for your business.

Social media is specifically networks, or platforms of people who gather to socialize online. The major social media platforms today are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Pintrest. There are many industry-specific groups within these platforms that are powerful places to market, such as Restaurant Owners on Facebook with 15597 members or the National Restaurant Professionals group on LinkedIn with 15973 members. In today’s world, you need a page for both you, as an individual, and one for your restaurant on each of these platforms. You then network into groups to find like-minded peers, vendors and customers. On your page, you create content that conveys the personality of your restaurant and offerings and then connect with users and do your best to get them to engage with you.

PR is a very specific marketing modality that uses the objective voice of a reporter or influencer to give their unbiased, unpaid opinion about your restaurant. Reporters and influencers can be found on TV, radio, online and in magazines and newspapers. Of all the marketing methods you can use, PR is often the first one employed as it is incredibly effective, wide reaching and very inexpensive. You can hire a PR firm to do this for you; a good one will cost about $6000 a month. For that investment, you should expect them to write your press kit materials, land approximately one article a month and provide an accountability report of at least 350% ROI (based on advertising equivalencies).

Social media and PR work together in that when you have an announcement to make, your publicist should be able to create a “newsworthy pitch” to provide to the press and use social media to get that message to the press and to your potential customer.

There is so much more to know about these things; this just provides an overall description. If you’d like an in-depth understanding of how to use PR for your business, there are books on the subject; this one written by yours truly,

called the PR Handbook for Entrepreneurs. Ironically enough it was originally a PR Manual that I wrote for Mrs. Fields Cookies franchisees!

Also, for a full primer on all the different kinds of marketing you can use to either launch a new concept or find new customers for an existing one, all Great Taste readers are welcome to download a free report called: Unraveling the Mysteries of What Marketing Means and The Marketing Umbrella: A List of Definitions.

Until then!